The initial impression that I gathered from my Twitter feed of writers and webcomic artists was using the iPad for presenting content.  Most writers saw the iPad and the iBookstore as an ebook competitor and what it means for publishing as a whole.  Most webcomic artists saw the iPad as a platform to present their archives or put together 24-page comics at near full-size and in color.  I'm looking at the iPad as a portable writing device and a programming platform.

What I need the most was a mobile replacement for my aging Mac mini (PPC) that has grown long in the tooth since the hard drive was killed last summer by killer dust bunnies after nearly five years of continuous use.  I need Pages (wordprocessing) from iWork for writing.  Check.  I need a virtual and physical keyboard support.  Check.  The price had to be less than a replacement Mac mini (Intel).  Check.

Ding-ding-ding! We got a winner!

As a writer, I can load up the iPad with my files and go anywhere to work with my manuscripts. Maybe the iPad will wean me away from yellow notepads and pens to finally embrace the paperless office.  Or someone will introduced a yellow notepad app with superb handwriting recognition.  Or, if the iPad ends up like my iPod Touch, it'll make a great paperweight Kindle reader.

I'm also looking for a new programming platform.  If I had the time, money and motivation when the iPhone first came out, I might've gotten in early on the app store craze and become an instant millionaire.  I haven't been enchanted by either the iPhone or Touch to jump on the bandwagon since then.  The one thing that I learned about being successful at anything is finding a niche that no one else wants and run with it.  I see opportunities to make to create applications that take advantage of the new iPad features.

I recently started reviewing the C programming language and plan to learn Objective-C programming language and the iPhone/iPad SDK.  My first applications will be similar to the Joomla! modules that I have done to pull pictures from various Twitter-based picture sharing websites.  If you look at Apple app store, you will find plenty of applications to upload pictures to these websites.  None, however, will pull pictures from those websites, present them in a slide show, and enable a user to set a picture as the wallpaper.

A more ambitious application is a kid-friendly turtle graphics with the LOGO programming language.  Why resurrect a near dead programming language on the iPad?

• There's nothing like that available in the Apple app store.
• The perfect opportunity to create a virtual version of Big Trak programmable tank that I loved as a kid, which, unbeknown to me at the time, was a physical version of the LOGO turtle.  (When Big Trak is reintroduced this year, I'm planning to get one and may casually steal the keypad interface for my own application.)
• The Berkeley LOGO (UCBLOGO) is a freeware interpreter with C source code that I can use in my own application without having to reinvent the wheel.
• The iPad is the perfect platform for an application of this nature.

When I get this application done, there are several more ideas I would like to pursue.  Once upon a time, I wanted to be a game programmer.  The iPad might be my ticket — especially if I become an instant millionaire.

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After I got my iPod Touch a few years ago to replace an old Palm PDA with outdated wireless technology that I couldn't pick up any access points to reach the Internet, I really haven't used it much since then.  I used to listen to my 80's music collection at the gym, but I never felt comfortable using the Touch in that kind of a sweaty environment.  When the third generation iPod Shuffle came out, I got one for the gym.  I loaded up the Touch with digital copies that came with certain DVD movies to watch on the train.  Although the Apple Apps Store has 70,000 applications to download, that was 70,000 applications more than I wanted to consider.  Except I did end up with two applications that's making me use my Touch more often now.

I first downloaded Kindle for the iPhone and iPod Touch when it first came out, and downloaded a sample chapter to test out the features.  That was okay.  But I'm more of a traditionalist who would rather have the actual dead tree edition to read through for more current books.  When I decided to pursue a classical education, I was surprised to find that many classical drama, history and literature books were either free or cost less than a buck.  I'm reading "The History of The Decline And Fall of The Roman Empire: Volumes 1 to 6" by Edward Gibbon, and downloaded "The Jewish Wars" by Flavius Josephus (translated by William Whiston) and "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes/The Return of Sherlock Holmes" by Sir Author Canon Doyle. Looks like I'll be reading all the classics from Kindle on my Touch from now on, saving space in my library for more current dead tree books.

The other application was Dictionary.Com, a free dictionary.  I was surprised to discover that Apple doesn't include the Dictionary from the Mac OS X on the Touch.  There's also the American Heritage Dictionary version that cost $25 USD.  Again, I'm a dead tree traditionalist when that much money is involved.  (I made the mistake of selling my 1987 copy of The Random House Dictionary of The English Language, Second Edition, a number of years ago.)  Since I started writing haiku poems that requires counting out a specific number syllables per line, I been consulting the Dictionary on my MacBook more often to determine how many syllables a word breaks into if I wasn't certain.  Having a dictionary on my Touch makes the process of refining my haiku poems in my writing journal much easier. Dictionary.Com also has a thesaurus for looking up other words, and extended features that requires wireless access (which really kills the battery life on the Touch).

If you're a writer with an iPod Touch, these are two must have applications.

Updated 7 September 2009 @ 12:15PM:  The Wall Street Journal  posted an interesting article on the state of the dictionary in today's electronic world.

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The newest version of the Mac OS X called Snow Leopard came out last Friday. Since this was a $29 upgrade, I pre-ordered from the Apple Store a few days before.  The FedEx driver showed up after lunch with the package, and I waited until my friend came over before installing on my first-generation, black MacBook.  We ate pizza while watching the installation progress bar fill up for 45 minutes, which is twice as fast as installing Leopard.  With Dilbert having a very geeky strip on dating relationships that day, I dared ask the most geekiest question: "Is this the reason why we don't have girlfriends?"

We both shuddered, inhaled deeply, and returned to our true love.

Snow Leopard has a ton of performance enhancements and no significant features.  My first impression was that the overall interface is much faster and more snappier.  What used to take five seconds for something to happen, now takes a few seconds.  That may not sound like a lot but it does add over time.  Beyond that, you really need to dig deeper to find all the other improvements.  Ars Technica has a 23-page detailed analysis of what's new in Snow Leopard, if you really, really want to know.  If you work professionally with Macs that will be running Snow Leopard, this is required reading.  Be forewarned, the analysis is so technical that it even put me to sleep.

Snow Leopard has been smoothest upgrade that I ever had on a Mac.  The only program that wasn't compatible was an older version of Parallels Desktop for running virtual machines that I haven't upgraded.  (Which, not surprisingly, I got an email today to upgrade to newest version that's Snow Leopard compatible.)  The Image Capture program has a better interface that makes downloading from my camera easy since I have 385 pictures accumulated over the last three years.  (One of these days, I'll dump the whole lot into Adobe Lightroom and erase the memory card.)  I also like how editing a photo in Adobe Photoshop doesn't change the file association to open in Preview.  That was something I was always changing back under Leopard.

My only real complaint with Snow Leopard is that this upgrade is only compatible with Intel CPUs.  I would very much love to have this performance increase on my Mac mini with a PowerPC CPU.  Then again, I really need to get a newer Mac mini that would run Snow Leopard a lot faster and take advantage of features that my MacBook can't handle.

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